I've been playing with water-soluble graphite sticks this week. The piece above is my favourite. I made it while letting my mind wander a bit. The lines started as abstract squiggles and then formed a face. The lines themselves aren't the sort of lines I would usually use to make a drawing of a face. They don't aim to catch a particular line accurately - they're just scribbles, really - but they still tell our brain that it's a face. It set me thinking about how far one can abstract a face and still read it as a face.
This one was the first using the graphite. I drew a face and then sprayed it with water. I wasn't happy with how the lines looked amongst the pools of grey, so I wiped a lot of it off and went back in with more lines.
They're darker than the other pieces because the paper was still wet when I drew the second lot of lines.
This one was the second one in the series and again has some of the more usual lines, but also wiped with water for shading. I found that just wiping over the lines with water made dark lines in a wash of pale grey, and wasn't the effect I was looking for. Maybe loading a wet brush with the graphite will be a better option.
The three below came after my favourite, and are the experimental lines without water. It seems that the brain likes to find faces in even the simplest of lines.
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